The first playable template table

The first real milestone was modest on purpose. Take Visual Pinball’s plain starter table, the one every new table begins from, and prove the whole loop works: put it together, play it, tweak it in the editor, bring the tweak back, and check that nothing broke.

Four jobs

Four jobs are now automatic:

• Build puts the table together into something Visual Pinball can play.
• Play opens it, building it first only if there’s nothing to play yet.
• Bring back takes changes made in Visual Pinball’s editor and folds them into the saved table.
• Check builds the table and makes sure Visual Pinball actually loads it.

Play deliberately won’t rebuild over a table that’s already there, because that copy might hold editor tweaks that haven’t been brought back yet. Losing an afternoon of tuning to a launch button would be a bad trade.

Bring back only touches the pieces that really changed, so an edit shows up as exactly what was edited and nothing else.

The pop-up problem

Visual Pinball has a habit that shaped all of this. When it can’t open a table, or something in it goes wrong, it shows an error pop-up and waits for someone to click it. For a check that runs on its own, a pop-up means it just sits there forever.

So the check never hands Visual Pinball a table that hasn’t already been confirmed to be put together correctly, and a load that takes longer than 30 seconds is stopped and counted as a failure. The same worry comes back, bigger, in the shot tests.

Tested first

Every one of the four jobs was written test first. The tests cover the obvious paths and the awkward ones, like a broken table leaving nothing half-built behind, and a check never feeding Visual Pinball something it can’t open.